56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports

by Kennedy, Kostya

  Yet Rose felt a clear and certain kinship to DiMaggio, his boyhood idol. Far more than most players around him Rose studied, and felt a connection to, the history of the game. He read baseball biographies, and he would ask coaches and veterans for information, for small but salient details he might apply to his own career, about the players who came before him. What impressed Rose most about DiMaggio—what made him leap when he was offered the chance, before the 1968 season, to go with DiMaggio on a goodwill trip to visit U.S. troops in Vietnam—was a single element of the DiMaggio legacy: Late in his career, his body aching and breaking down, DiMaggio still ran out every hopeless pop-up, every routine ground ball, even in the final throes of a blowout game. “It’s because there may be someone in the crowd who has never seen me play before,” DiMaggio said memorably, explaining his hustle. Those were words that Rose heard about as a young ballplayer, words that never left him.

  “I still don’t know why they invited me to go to Vietnam with him,” says Rose. “I wasn’t really famous yet, just in Cincinnati. When they said, ‘Do you want to go to see the troops, to lift morale?’ I said, ‘not necessarily.’ It was 1967 in Vietnam! Kind of scary. Then they said Joe DiMaggio was going and I said put me down. If it was good enough for Joe DiMaggio, it was good enough for me.

  “We got over there and it was a jungle. Hot as hell. They gave us these ‘GS 15’ identification cards and we always had to have them with us to show we were part of the military. GS 15 made us honorary colonels! I must have been the youngest colonel ever. You needed those cards so that in case you got captured you’d be treated like a prisoner of war. Otherwise if they got you they could do whatever they wanted to you.

  “We were in Vietnam for 19 days, just going from barracks to barracks in different spots. It was hot, man. And it was pretty hairy sometimes. You heard mortar shells going off pretty much wherever you were. We’d sometimes travel in a helicopter and we’d fly low, practically skimming the treetops, going very fast, 140 miles an hour. I thought it was the pilot playing with us, giving us a little joyride, but then we found out it was because of ground fire. We had to move fast so no one could shoot us. In one place that we were, a U.S. helicopter came in and they started bringing out body bags—I counted them. Nineteen. All dead marines. I swear to God. I just kept telling myself, Hey if Joe DiMaggio can be here and do this, then I can too.

  “The soldiers all couldn’t wait to meet him, they’d come up and gather around. But then all they wanted to ask him about was Marilyn Monroe! He never talked about her. I couldn’t have cared less, I just wanted to talk to Joe about hitting, about baseball, about how to stay out of a slump—I hated slumping. He didn’t say much, but if he did tell me an old story, I would eat it up. I was just thrilled because I knew that after that trip Joe DiMaggio would always know me. I figured he’d be watching me.”

  BY THEN, AND on into the 1970s, most major leaguers couldn’t help but to appreciate, even admire, Rose as much as the fans did. Sure, he still irked some players, guys who wished he’d just pipe down, but there was no dismissing the sincerity of Rose’s style. Even if he was brassy, barreling about, embracing the press, ready to talk baseball, anytime, anywhere, with anyone; even if he had a certain hubris, declaring his intention to be the best hitter and highest paid player in the game; well, even so, he never lost his innocent affection for the game, never betrayed a moment of guile, never shed the aw-shucks aura that had marked him when he strode into the major leagues as a big-eared, buzz-cut rookie. He won a batting title in 1968, another in ’69, and between those years he was visited in spring training by Ted Williams, who said to him, with everyone listening, that if there was anyone out there who could hit .400 in a season and be the first to do it since Williams himself had hit .406 in that long-ago and gilded summer of ’41, if anyone could do it, it would be “you Pete, you’ve got the goods.”

  Rose coveted statistics, cited them unbidden in postgame interviews (in 1964 after ending a modest 11-game hitting streak he’d volunteered to a reporter, “I never did think Joe DiMaggio’s streak was in danger”) and this was just another part of his strange charm. The numbers were carrots to a plow horse. “Pete Rose is the most statistics-conscious ballplayer I’ve ever known,” the great Reds catcher Johnny Bench said once. “And I wish we had eight more guys like him.”

  Rose turned 37 in 1978, his hair long and shaggy now, his muttonchop sideburns running deep along his jawline. Pete Rose was now nearly as often called Charlie Hustle, a nickname first bestowed with a mild sense of derision when Rose was an exuberant minor leaguer, but now imbued with respect. A Cincinnati Enquirer poll that season—published, coincidentally, just a few days after Rose’s hitting streak had begun—reported to no one’s surprise that his peers around the National League considered Rose the “best competitor in the game.” A total of 30 players were surveyed. Rose received 14 votes. No one else got as many as four.

  The oldest player on the Reds, Rose should have been in his twilight. He’d played in nearly 2,400 career games, come to bat some 11,000 times, worn down more cleats than all but a tiny handful of major leaguers will wear down in a lifetime. And yet it was impossible to view Rose, on the heels of yet another 200-hit, .300 season as in anything but full bloom. “Rose ignores birthdays,” said Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson that spring. “In his mind he’s a 17-year-old, with the same enthusiasms and desires of a kid that age.”

  He began that ’78 season 34 hits shy of 3,000 in his career, and just before Opening Day he predicted, correctly as it turned out, that he would pass the milestone in a May series against the Expos. After that? “Four thousand hits is impossible,” said Rose, “but 3,631 is possible— that would top Stan Musial’s National League record. I’d like that.”

  The nation now knew well who Pete Rose was, and not just from his amusing Aqua Velva TV commercials. In the ads, Rose, in his Reds uniform, was shown at the plate, rapping pitch after pitch; a moment later he was holding up a flask of the blue aftershave lotion, grinning his toothsome grin, his bangs low on his forehead, and singing—yes, singing!—that there was something about an Aqua Velva man. The irony that the irrepressible Rose, the sweatiest ballplayer alive, would rely not on nature’s salty funk but on a store-bought tonic to make him “smell like a man,” was lost on no one. He had become a household name with the Reds’ four trips to the World Series between 1970 and ’76, and with his 1973 National League MVP Award. He’d batted .370 in Cincinnati’s win over Boston in the entrancing, seven-game Series of 1975; stepping up to bat in the 10th inning of the epic Game 6, Rose had turned to Boston catcher Carlton Fisk and said, “This is some kind of game, isn’t it?” At the end of that season SPORTS ILLUSTRATED had named Pete Rose its Sportsman of the Year.

  “You have to think first of what Rose has meant to baseball,” said Reds second baseman and two-time MVP Joe Morgan a few days after Rose had lashed an opposite-field single off Expos’ ace Steve Rogers for hit number 3,000 in ’78. “Pete has everyone’s respect. And he’d have it if he hit only .220.”

  Rose did hit .220, practically, for more than a month after getting that 3,000th hit against Rogers, slipping into an extended slump that reached a nadir of 5 hits in 43 at bats. When the Cubs came to town to play the Reds on June 14, Rose was hitting .267. “Geez, it looks like even the umpires are wearing gloves out there,” he said. That day, with Dave Roberts on the hill for Chicago, Rose got two hits. He had it in his mind that he needed to raise that batting average quickly, to get it up over .300 before the All-Star game, when his treasured numbers would be posted up on the scoreboard and flashed on TV screens for all the country to see.

  In the beginning, naturally, the streak was barely notable; Rose was just shaking his slump and returning to his consistent ways. In game number 2, Tom Seaver, the Reds ace who had been wrenched dramatically from the Mets in a 1977 trade and was already vaunted in Cincinnati, threw a no-hitter. After game number 9, in which Rose had four hits, the papers first made note
of Rose’s fledgling streak and noted it again at game 14. The Reds were scuffling—on July 2 they’d lost six straight—but Rose was beginning to feed off his own success: three hits in game 19, three more in game 22, and then the All-Star break did come, the players bound for San Diego. Rose was up to .303, just as he’d wanted, and his hitting streak stood at 25 games, tying the longest of his career, inching upward into rare air for any ballplayer. He volunteered after that 25th game that he was just 12 games shy of the modern National League record, 37 games, set in 1945 by Tommy Holmes. And then reporters asked Rose for the first time about DiMaggio, about where Rose thought he might take this streak of his. Rose shrugged and let his grin open up. “I might go on forever,” he said.

  Rose had received 2,980,377 All-Star votes, a record for a third baseman, and he got a hit in that game too, doubling during the seventh inning of the NL’s 7–3 win. When the regular season resumed, Rose passed the Reds modern-era club record for a hitting streak (27 games), then broke Red Schoendienst’s major league record for a switch hitter (28). After Rose hit in his 31st straight, oddsmakers in Las Vegas put him on the board. He was 5-to-1 to pass Holmes. (“If anyone can do it, Rose can,” said Bob Martin, who set the betting line for the Union Plaza Hotel.) To pass DiMaggio? Those odds were 1,000-to-1.

  There was not a ballplayer in the game better suited to the attention and excitement that began to follow Rose. He embraced the horde of media, and as the crush grew with each game, as Reds shortstop Dave Concepcíon, who—wearing No. 13 and thus lockering next to No. 14 Rose—grumbled that he could hardly get dressed at his locker for all the reporters hovering around, new provisions were made. Rose would meet the press in a separate conference room, home or away, before every game and then once again, triumphantly, after it. The national media was drawn not just by the length of the streak, but by the magnetism of the man who was on it.

  When it came to the media and to social presence, Rose could not have been more unlike DiMaggio—Pete exceptionally garrulous, Joe exceptionally demure. (Later in Rose’s career he and DiMaggio sometimes appeared together at charity golf tournaments. “Joe could be stiff; he was uncomfortable around people,” Rose recalls. “I loosened him up.”) So too was Rose a much different man than DiMaggio in the batter’s box. In game 32, against Philadelphia reliever Ron Reed, Rose bunted his way on in his final at bat—with two outs in the top of the ninth inning and Cincinnati leading the Phillies 7–2. By baseball etiquette this was certainly no bunting situation and Reed recalls that, “I must have been screaming at Pete all the way down the first base line.” It was one of six times that Rose kept his streak alive with a bunt, something DiMaggio had never done. (Once, in the late 1930s, manager Joe McCarthy was asked whether DiMaggio was an able bunter. He replied, “I’ll never know.”) DiMaggio homered 15 times in his streak, Rose not once. Rather, Rose proved Keeleresque—time and again placing balls just outside a fielder’s reach. Rose joked that if baseball teams added a fourth outfielder for short centerfield, “I’d bat .260.”

  No one was more a victim of Rose’s precision than Mike Schmidt, the Phillies third baseman—a prodigious hitter and a 10-time gold glove winner of whom Rose would say, “He was the best player I’ve ever been on a baseball field with.” Schmidt couldn’t scoop that surprise bunt that Rose laid down in game 32 of the streak, nor come up with another perfectly placed one in game 41. Then in game 43, moments after Philadelphia manager Danny Ozark had motioned Schmidt to come several strides closer to the plate, Rose, batting lefthanded, drove a hot, low line-drive past Schmidt’s left side and into the outfield. If Schmidt were playing back, in his normal spot, he would have snagged the ball easily. “Rose is my hero,” Schmidt said later. “He makes me look in the mirror and if what I see is 100%, then I’m coming up short.”

  Opponents couldn’t help but root for Rose, an elder statesman who always had time to talk about hitting, to give a restaurant tip, to offer some pithy advice on women. On the field he was electrifying, his helmet flying off, a hit machine, and, in that summer of ’78, he was elevating the game. Crowds came out on the road to see him: an extra 11,000 people per night for a three-game series in Philadelphia; an added 8,000 per game during a visit to Montreal. When Rose came to New York, on the cusp of Holmes’s National League record, aiming to extend his streak to 37, 38, and 39 games, the Mets were averaging 14,503 fans a night. For that three-game set more than 94,000 turned out to Shea Stadium.

  The New York crowds wanted their cellar-dwelling Mets to win, but just as ardently wanted Rose to get his hit. The media all but ignored Seaver in this return to Shea, scarcely dwelled on the Reds’ tight position in the pennant race. Rose was the story and the fans adored him, even here at Shea Stadium, where in the 1973 playoffs he had memorably fought with Mets shortstop Bud Harrelson—trading violent blows right in the open at second base—and thus incurred the wrath of fans who for seasons afterward hurled obscenities and vicious boos and even bottles and batteries at Rose whenever he came to town. Now they had a different view of the man. When Rose stepped up in the seventh inning of the first game of the series and swung at an outside pitch, lining a 1-and-1 sinker from Pat Zachry into leftfield for the single that brought the streak to a record-tying 37 straight games, that Shea Stadium crowd stood en masse, cheering and clapping for more than three minutes, and shouting in adoration, “Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete.”

  They roared like that the next night too, when Rose, again with a single to left, in the third inning this time, made the record all his own. The fans hollered louder still as Rose raised his helmet in acknowledgment, and some waved pennants or puffed out their chests, flaunting the T-shirts that they’d bought, full of hope, outside the Stadium: I SAW PETE ROSE DO IT, the shirts and pennants read. The game was stopped and the Reds players stood clapping at the edge of their dugout and the photographers descended onto the field. Mets pitcher Craig Swan walked back to the dugout and put on a warmup jacket to wait it out. To first base came the now-former record holder Tommy Holmes, who was then, as fate had it, working in the Mets front office. He shook Rose’s hand, refused Rose’s offer to keep the historic baseball and then, as cameras flashed, Tommy Holmes, four months past his 61st birthday, leaned in and said, “Thanks for making me famous again, Pete.”

  When the inning ended, and Rose was stranded at first, the Reds refused to bring out his glove to him, refused to take the field, waiting for Rose to come back to the dugout, to come home as it were, to get his glove himself and to be hugged and back-slapped and cheered again before the game could go on.

  Not that the Mets players had wanted this to happen. As much as they may have revered him—before the middle game of the series, Mets shortstop Tim Foli and his wife hit up Rose for an autograph—they wanted to foil him too. The night after the record-breaker the Mets put on a defensive shift, plugging up the left side of the infield and successfully denying Rose a would-be hit in the first inning before his double into the right centerfield gap in the fifth beat the shift and extended the streak to 39 games.

  “Sure, there was a part of each of us that wanted to see him do well,” recalls Zachry, who had come over from Cincinnati in the Seaver trade the year before. “But mainly we wanted to be the ones to stop that streak. Every pitcher wanted to be the one to end it. Our whole team, we’d get together and talk about how best to stop the guy.” After giving up the record-tying single in game 37, and then coming out of the game, Zachry says, “I was so ticked off, just so disappointed. I had to let it out.” Boiling, Zachry tried to kick a helmet in the Mets dugout. He missed, connected instead with the dugout step, and broke his foot. Zachry had won 10 games already that year, had made the All-Star team, was an early Cy Young contender; the foot injury ended his season.

  Rose got to the ballpark even earlier than usual during his streak, and now he had purpose beyond his extra batting practice. He was doing radio and television interviews with every local outlet that asked; he appeared on Good Morning America, on Donahu
e, on The Today Show; he landed new commercials—Swanson’s Hungry Man pizza, for one—with each passing day. Mail poured in now, shoeboxes full, fans encouraging Rose to keep on hitting and thanking him for his spirit, his hustle, for the way he played the game. When 30-year-old Johnny Bench was asked around this time what he thought he would be doing at age 50, the catcher responded with a quizzical look, as if the answer were obvious: “Why, I’ll be at the ballpark watching Pete play,” he said.

  With Holmes now passed, congratulatory missives also arrived from the governors of Ohio and New York. Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn wrote to Rose; NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle sent a bottle of champagne. The comedian Bill Cosby wrote Rose a fan letter, as did the singer Toni Tennille from the hit TV show The Captain & Tennille. And Morganna, the mononymical, bleached-blonde and mammoth-breasted lounge stripper known as the Kissing Bandit—her singular skill was to run onto a major league field in the middle of a game and plant her lips on a player’s mouth, and in 1971 Rose had been her first victim—well, she too sent her fondest wishes.

  The streak was making Rose whole in every way. In early June, Pete and his wife, Karolyn, had separated after 14 years of marriage. Pete took the blame, saying he had neglected his wife because of his obsession with baseball, but both Roses hoped to reconcile. When, with the streak in the 30s, Karolyn was contacted by a reporter, she spoke of how closely she and their two children, Fawn and Pete Jr., were following what Pete was doing. She talked about what an “amazing man” Pete was, about what strength he had. Later that summer, the Roses got back together.